“Then—what happened?” Ayla asked.

Lady Dear cocked her head, a movement reminiscent of the pheasants in Queen Junn’s aviary. “What do you mean, what happened? She was terminated. She was remade, I assume, though by then I’d long since left the Midwifery. Even if I’d been there to meet her, the new Delphi wouldn’t have been the same as the friend I lost. None of her memories would have remained.”

Ayla found herself staring out the window of the bedchamber, reluctant to look at Lady Dear’s face. Her window offered a view of the city below; seated as she was in the center of the room, she couldn’t see the rooftops from this angle, but she could see the occasional circling seagull. The afternoon sky was the pale blue of sun-bleached fabric.

“Fifty-six years have passed since then. Yet I still think of Delphi every day. My Kind remembers everything, you see. I can recite a thousand different books word for word, no matter how long ago I read them; the details never fade. I wish they did.”

“Does it . . . get easier?” Ayla whispered.

“Yes. In many ways, yes. I’ve heard it compared to missing a limb. The wound heals over. You adjust to this new way of moving through the world. But it always aches, and not just physically, and you never forget what was lost.” Her voice was distant, and Ayla wondered if she was sifting through flawlessly preserved memories, if some part of her was in the past.

It was too much. Ayla didn’t want to empathize with this Automa noblewoman. She didn’t want to empathize with any of them, because if she did—if she did—

“Lessons are over for today,” said Lady Dear, surprising her. “They will resume the day after tomorrow. At dawn.”

“Why not tomorrow?” asked Ayla.

Lady Dear looked at her. At this angle, her eyes caught the sunlight, flashing catlike gold.

“Did no one tell you?” she said. “Tomorrow is the feast.”

As far as Ayla could tell, the feast was meant to honor the Varnian elite who had traveled to Thalen for the Maker’s Festival. It was a celebration and a farewell, and would be attended exclusively by the rich and influential. That morning, the three handmaidens Maris, Renne, and Kiv didn’t barge into Ayla’s room at the crack of dawn. Someone had left a silver platter of breakfast outside her door, but all the palace servants had been working throughout the night making sure everything was ready for the feast, and the work would continue through the day. Ayla sat in the middle of her cloudlike bed, eating breakfast just because she could, and felt very strange about not joining them. She remembered her first day as Crier’s handmaiden: she hadn’t even seen Crier for most of the day, she’d just been scurrying around polishing floors and running errands for the kitchen boys as a stream of guests arrived at the palace. Ayla remembered being assigned the impossible task of polishing the entire dance floor by hand; she remembered pushing up her sleeves and getting to it, the lye soap burning her hands. She remembered looking up to see Nessa standing over her, baby Lily strapped to Nessa’s front.